Delacroix residents 'never imagined how bad it would get': Part four of four

In the early 1960s, Delacroix Island native Henry Martinez began noticing changes in the lush marshlands he trapped and fished.

View full sizeTed Jackson, The Times-PicayuneA lone pickup speeds down the single road to Delacroix Island along the bayou where large oaks used to stand.

The water was getting deeper. All his life, it had been wrist-deep when he set his traps, and the same when he picked them up. Now, the water reached his elbow.

The tides were getting stronger, too, moving with more speed and rising higher on the upswing.

And the land -- as they called the marsh -- was shrinking, falling apart; islands were getting smaller, bayous wider.

He and others in the isolated but prosperous bayou enclave figured the canal dredging for oil and gas might be causing the changes.

"But we never imagined how bad it would get, how it would all end," recalled Martinez, now 67.

The end of their world did not come in the form of a cataclysm. Rather, it was like an undiagnosed disease that showed only vague and scattered symptoms until it grew terminal. For more than 200 years, the wetlands along Bayou Terre aux Boeufs and the St. Bernard delta had supported a unique culture, provided livelihoods and buffered a community from the rapid societal changes sweeping the nation beyond their cypress trees. They lived lifestyles little changed from the subsistence culture established by their ancestors in the mid-1700s: fishing, trapping, hunting, speaking Spanish -- and hardly traveling outside.

What they didn't know then was that their wetlands had been under attack for more than 50 years. By the early 1960s, they were being tamed by hard-surfaced roads, drowned by flood-protection levees and strangled by industries that brought canal dredging to the fragile ecosystem.

View full sizeTed Jackson, The Times-PicayuneThere was a time when Delacroix was a thriving community of 700 fishers and trappers , surrounded by forests of oak, maple and sycamore trees. Now, in this aerial, ,taken June 20, barely a sliver remains as the marsh continues to succumb to subsidence, hurricanes and land loss.

Asphalt and concrete highways were an obvious sign, and they quickly began changing the social order. While shell and mud roads had reached Delacroix by the 1920s, getting in and out remained a difficult and time-consuming challenge, taken on mainly for commerce. The all-weather surfaces that came in the 1950s allowed more residents to get jobs at the refineries and manufacturing concerns closer to the city. As people on "The Island" got exposed to a different, more comfortable life, a slow migration began.

A father's advice

But a more fundamental change was under way. The wetlands ecosystem was dying, and some of the senior members of the community had noticed. Lloyd "Wimpy" Serigne had always counted on being a fisherman. But as he entered his teens, his father disabused him of that notion.

View full sizeTed Jackson, The Times-PicayuneLloyd 'Wimpy' Serigne's father 'encouraged me to move up the road, get a job in one of the towns.' Serigne was photographed motoring down the bayou along what's left of Delacroix Island on July 16.

"He encouraged me to move up the road, get a job in one of the towns," said Serigne, who took his father's advice and became a Teamster.

The father could see a way of life starting to slip away with the ever-higher tides, even if he didn't know exactly why at the time. "Of course, back then people didn't realize why it was happening."

In fact, for 70 years, residents mostly supported the very forces that would spell doom for their lifestyle -- levees and canals dredged for oil, gas and shipping.

They applauded dependable levees on the Mississippi River because they could prevent floods that inundated cropland and even homes. But sealing bayous like Terre aux Boeufs from the river stopped the delivery of the silt and fresh water the delta needed to remain above sea level. Without the silt, it would slowly sink, becoming ever more vulnerable to flooding.

If levees were all that had happened to the delta, the wetlands in place at the turn of the century would have remained largely intact for hundreds of years, coastal scientists have said. But in the 1930s, oil and gas was discovered in the coastal zone, unleashing a frenzy of canal dredging that would compress the wetlands' demise into 70 years.

"That was the shortest way to drilling sites," Martinez said. "To be honest, at the time we didn't mind those canals, because they were shortcuts across the marsh for us, too."

Fatal wounds

At first the impacts seemed incremental to residents like Serigne and Martinez. But in truth, the changes were gathering speed; as scientists now know, they are exponential. As a lagoon, canal or lake becomes wider, wind-driven waves become larger and strike fragile shorelines with growing energy, further widening the area of open water, leading to still-larger waves and greater damage.

A total of 27,600 acres of marsh in St. Bernard Parish were converted to open water between 1930 and 2005. Today, according to federal reports, Lake Borgne shoreline "retreat" averages between 2 and 27 feet per year.

All those impacts were greatly exacerbated when the nation -- with the support of local worthies -- ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, designed as a shortcut for big ships between the Gulf of Mexico and port of New Orleans. When politicians cut the ribbons in 1963, they opened a wound 76 miles long, 500 feet wide and 32 feet deep into the pristine wetlands of eastern St. Bernard Parish.

Removal of the marsh wasn't the only damage canal dredging was doing. Wetlands scientists say deltas can maintain their elevation against sea level not just by the seasonal addition of new sediments from the river that builds them, but also with sediment delivered when high tides wash over the marshes, and from the detritus from the annual decay of lush plant communities.

But the canal-dredging techniques employed in coastal Louisiana deposited the removed material in a line along the canals, creating so-called "spoil levees." Those levees, researchers report, form dams blocking the overbank flooding that could help maintain a delta starved of river sediment.

And the canal systems also opened highways for salty Gulf water to invade freshwater marshes in the northern end of the estuaries, removing entire plant communities, converting fresh and brackish marsh to salt, and others to open water. With plant production removed or dramatically curtailed, the wetlands lost another source of sediment.

By the 1970s, local fishers sensed the fate of their world. The MR-GO had nearly doubled in width to a quarter-mile at some points and grew monthly; much of eastern St. Bernard Parish was falling into Lake Borgne, while its southern edges were being consumed by Breton Sound and Black Bay. Land once used for vegetable gardens was now being flooded with salty water. Even small storms carried surges that could flood homes.

View full sizeThe Times-Picayune archiveThe storm surge and winds of Hurricane Betsy in 1965 too houses south of the highway running through Delacroix Island and lifted them either onto the highway or to the other side of the road.

The storms

Any who remained in denial were shocked to reality on Sept. 9, 1965, when Hurricane Betsy ravaged their community. Not only were most homes destroyed, but the fragile condition of the wetlands was made plain.

Still, 80 percent of the natives didn't want to give up their lifestyles and resettled in Delacroix within three years. But social changes accelerated. Residents watched their community start to morph from a tight-knit working village to a weekend playground, with almost as many camps as permanent homes.

Even projects designed to help the decaying marsh took a toll. The Caernarvon freshwater diversion -- originally designed to help oyster fishers by preventing the outer bays from becoming too salty for the crustaceans -- was also hailed for its ability to strengthen marsh plants with surges of fresh water. But local fishers said that change also pushed inshore shrimping out of business and, they believe, actually destroyed marsh rather than bolstered it.

"You can't find a brown shrimp inside no more," said Martinez. "And it's hurt that marsh. Land we used to be able to walk on is now open water. How did that help?"

A still more devastating blow came on Aug. 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina basically wiped Delacroix from the map -- taking as much as 120 square miles of the wetlands with it. Few natives ignored that message.

Today, fewer than 15 families live in the community full time. Most new construction after the storm was for fishing camps. Commercial crabbing is still viable, but most crabbers commute, just like the sportsmen, the "chivos" they once ridiculed as clueless outsiders.

Thomas Gonzales knows the world surrounding his trailer now doesn't resemble the habitat where he grew up: "People talk about the 'wet lands.' The only wet lands left is in my yard when it rains. There's no land left out there."

BP

In April, the few surviving remnants of the old Delacroix lifestyle became threatened when BP's Deepwater Horizon exploded and began sending a river of oil toward the surviving wetlands. Like much of the coast, most of St. Bernard Parish was closed to fishing.

Many locals began picking up paychecks as high as $1,500 a day working cleanup, and villages such as Delacroix have become boomtowns invaded by hundreds of workers. But instead of lifting spirits, the windfall has only deepened the sense of loss and anxiety among natives, the sense of a world ending.

"That money I'm getting now is good, but we all know it ain't gonna last forever, or even very long," said Martinez. "I'm worried about what we're going to have left when they leave in a few months or next year.

"If that oil messes up the crabs from laying their eggs, where are we gonna get crabs next year? And if people in other parts of the country don't want our crabs, what kind of price we gonna get here?"

"If I can't crab, what am I going to do? I'm 70 years old. This is the only way I know how to make a living."

View full sizeTed Jackson, The Times-PicayuneLloyd 'Wimpy' Serigne and fellow BP workers beach their boats in the marsh grasses southeast of Delacroix Island while they await their work orders for the day July 16.

Serigne, retired several years, has been picking up an extra paycheck as a deckhand on response boats. But the financial gain comes with a price: He feels the anxiety sweeping through men and women who still want and need to live off the wetlands.

"People are really, really worried, depressed," he said. "All they talk about is, 'What's going to be left when BP leaves? Never in my life did I think anything like this would happen. Even after all the bad stuff before -- the canals, erosion, hurricanes.

"You think about what we had not long ago. You can't imagine what was there. What we already lost."

These days, when Serigne and Martinez visit the scene of their childhood adventures, they see a thin, battered strip of open land between an encroaching bayou and an expanding marsh. The hardwood forests are gone. So are the dance halls, groceries, schools and churches. The only Spanish they hear is their own. The touchstones of their early lives have been erased.

"When you look at this -- this graveyard," Serigne said, running his eyes over the empty lots and sunken boats, "it's hard to tell the young people what was here just a short time ago."